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Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
- Circlecrypto2 2y agoSeems like CIOs are finally listening to the Grey beards.
- candiddevmike 2y agoI would guess that all of these companies that are moving back are throwing in the towel on their cloud migration/modernization plans under the guise of "repatriation" when it's really poor execution without any responsibility.
- dilyevsky 2y agoOur poor strategic planning for cases where migration wasn’t necessary/feasible in the first place
- toomuchtodo 2y agoIt was easy when everyone was spending cheap money for marketing and other vanity around moving to the cloud. But now that money costs something, and everyone has to control costs, repatriation is the new hotness when you want to save opex with capex. Cloud margins are org savings. The trick is to not care, and be proficient as a technologist; you make money either way riding the hype cycle wave. Shades of Three Envelopes for the CIO and whomever these decisions and budgets roll up to. https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/ https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/ (If you genuinely get value out of premium compute and storage at a cloud provider, you're likely going to keep doing that of course, startups, unpredictable workloads, etc)
- maccard 2y agoOne of the things about startups is that if you’ve got any external validation, gcp/aws/azure will give you 2-3 years worth of free credits. When money is tight, free compute goes a long way.
- jsnell 2y agoI don't know that 37Signals counts as a "major enterprise". Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.
- WaxProlix 2y agoHow much of that is what technologists would consider "cloud" (IAAS, PAAS) versus what someone on the business side of things would consider "cloud" - office365, google gsuite, etc?
- tiffanyh 2y agoGiven that AWS is doing $100B in annual revenue and still growing at 17% YoY ... and they do NOT have a collaboration suite (office/gsuite) - it'd say at least for AWS it's nearly all IaaS/PaaS. https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/
- gonzo41 2y agoI'd agree on IaaS/PaaS being the main driver. Id guess that everyone is running away from serverless offerings from all the main cloud providers. It's just day 1 lock in to a platform with no shared standards. It's very uncompetitive and kind of slow to innovate.
- discodave 2y agoAmazon loves it when you run idle EC2 instances ($$$) rather than using Lambda. Most real workloads I've seen (at 3 startups, and several teams at Amazon) have utilization under 10%.
- _heimdall 2y agoThat's really where you see that no answer is right across the board. I worked at a very small startup years ago that leaned heavily on EC2. Our usage was pretty bipolar, the service was along the lines of a real-time game so we either had a very heavy work load or nothing. We stood up EC2 instances when games were lice and wound them down after. We did use Lambda for a few things, mainly APIs that were rarely used or for processing jobs in an event queue. Serverless has its place for sure, but in my experience it have been heavily over used the last 3-5 years.
- switch007 2y ago"Major organizations like 37signals and GEICO". Sorry, what? Citing two companies? And how does a $37bn company compare to 37signals? Such an odd pair of companies to choose. Is DHH friends with the author? I'd be more interested in statistics about total cloud vs onprem spend across all companies, over time, to support assertion that "companies are ditching the cloud" A very poor article
- discodave 2y agoThe statistics can be found in the public earnings of AWS vs the companies that would get paid for on-prem workloads (Equinix, Dell/HP/IBM, Intel etc).
- panrobo 2y agoI don't think the article concludes that companies are ditching the cloud.. :)
- openplatypus 2y agoIt is not reputable article. Click bait.
- theginger 2y agoAlmost any story about cloud repatriation is a story about a failure of the market to act competitively rather than someone actually able to do it for less money than the cloud providers can. The big providers margins are crazy, like over 50% which is normal for a software / service business but they are essentially hardware businesses.
- cyberax 2y agoThe article is incredibly thin on details. In my experience, it comes down to two factors: 1. Egress cost. Cloud hosting providers have absolutely insane egress pricing. It's beyond stupid at this point, if you want to host anything bandwidth-intensive. 2. Storage pricing.
- hylaride 2y ago"Storage is cheap, but moving it ain't" is a quote a former co-worker frequently liked to remind people. The quote applied at the low level (eg between CPUs and their caches) all the way up to networking. Anyways, cloud provider egress costs can be ridiculous. Amazon charges for egress transfer out of AWS, then quite a bit for NAT gateway transfer, and AWS network firewall on top of that (we dropped the firewall and moved our bulk traffic to a specific outer subnet because of that). Oh, and you can't give many serverless products (eg lambda) elastic IPs, so out the NAT gateway it goes... So. Frustrating.
- discodave 2y agoMeanwhile, from Q3 Amazon earnings: * AWS segment sales increased 19% year-over-year to $27.5 billion. That means AWS brought in $4.3 BILLION more dollars in Q3 2024 vs 2023. That's a huge amount of incremental revenue growth. If the net movement of workloads were out of the cloud, then it would have to show up in the results of Intel / TSMC / Equinix et. al. I just took a look, and Equinix quarterly revenue is $2.1B.
- kjellsbells 2y agoKjell's Law: the cost of a platform eventually exceeds the cost of the one it replaced. But each cost is in a different budget. We seem to have replaced cooling and power and a grumpy sysadmin with storage and architects and unhappy developers.
- gtirloni 2y agoWe had happy developers before? Amazing.
- jimt1234 2y agoI've never worked in a data center that did cooling and power correctly. Everyone thinks they're doing it right, and then street power gets cut - there's significant impact, ops teams scramble to contain, and finally there's the finger-pointing.
- w0m 2y agoI mean; it's impossible to plan for everything, and I'd argue that if you actually did plan for everything; it would be so extraordinarily overbuilt that it couldn't be considered 'correct'.
- danudey 2y ago> then street power gets cut Or the electrician doing maintenance on the backup generator doesn't properly connect the bypass and no one notices until he disconnects the generator and the entire DC instantly goes quiet. Or your DC provisions rack space without knowing which servers are redundant with which other servers, and suddenly when two services go from 10% CPU use to 100% CPU across ten servers the breaker for that circuit gives up entirely and takes down your entire business.
- chromanoid 2y agoI prefer this https://blogs.idc.com/2024/10/28/storm-clouds-ahead-missed-expectations-in-cloud-computing/# https://blogs.idc.com/2024/10/28/storm-clouds-ahead-missed-e... more nuanced article. I can see how AI workloads makes clouds look expensive.
- asdasdsddd 2y ago> “Ten years into that journey, GEICO still hadn’t migrated everything to the cloud, their bills went up 2.5x, and their reliability challenges went up quite a lot too.” yes this would make cloud cost a lot without any of the benefits lol
- tschellenbach 2y agoChat, feeds and moderation run on AWS for us. Video on the other hand is bandwidth intensive. So we run the coordinator infra on AWS, but the SFU edge network on many different providers. I think the cloud is good for some things, and not so great for others. S3 is fairly cost effective. RDS is expensive, bandwidth is crazy etc. (5M a year spend on AWS atm.)
- kuon 2y agoYou can have a 100Gb uplink on a dedicated fibre for less than 1000$/month now. Which is insanely less than cloud bandwidth. Of course there are tons of other costs, but that alone can suffice to justify moving out of the cloud for bandwidth intensive app.
- Salgat 2y agoWe went to cloud because 1) we only need 3 infra guys to run our entire platform and 2) we can trivially scale up or down as needed. The first saves us hundreds of thousands in skilled labor and the second lets us take on new customers with thousands of agents in a matter of days without having to provision in advance.
- packetlost 2y ago1) You may more than pay for that labor in cloud costs, but you can also pretty easily operate rented dedicated hardware with a 3-man team if they know how to do it, the tools to scale are there they're just different. 2) I don't know what your setup looks like, but renting a dedicated server off of Hetzner takes a few minutes, maybe hours at most. My personal opinion is that most workloads that have a load balancer anyways would be best suited to a mix of dedicated/owned infrastructure for baseline operation and dynamic scaling to a cloud for burst. The downsides to that approach are it requires all of skillset A (systems administration, devops) and some amount of skillset B (public cloud), and the networking constraints can be challenging depending on how state is managed.
- karmakaze 2y agoIt's a short simple post that comes down to this: > Weekly explains that “just running legacy applications in the cloud is prohibitively expensive,” highlighting how lift-and-shift approaches often fail to deliver expected benefits. Yes, if you have a mature business without active development at a scale where compute/storage costs is a substantial accounting line item, then it makes sense to run on hardware that doesn't have the flexibility and cost of the cloud. There is an in-between that makes much more sense for most though. Running on provisioned bare metal. Lots of providers offer this as a better performance/price option where you don't have to deal with provisioning hardware but do everything else from the OS+maintenance and up. At one company we used large bare-metal machine instances provisioned for stable parts of the application architecture (e.g. database and webapp instances) and the cloud for new development where it made sense to leverage capabilities, e.g. DynamoDB with cross-region replication.
- hylaride 2y agoI can't tell you how often I've run into cloud deployments that were lift-and-shifts, pushed on by bean counters wanting OPEX instead of CAPEX. They then run into actual cashflow expenses, less stability, more complex security (now you get IAM on top of basic networking!), and the ability for one underpaid person to easily do a lot of damage - because you're certainly not going to hire top-tier cloud talent - these are bean counters running things after all. It makes it really clear why you so many data leaks via badly configured s3 buckets of dynamo tables...
- maccard 2y agoIt’s a bit naive to think that this sort of an org went from hiring top tier sysadmin staff to bottom of the barrel developers for cloud dev. It’s likely they were a thundering mess when they managed their own hardware too.
- vel0city 2y ago> now you get IAM on top of basic networking! You always had IAM even on prem. Just before IAM meant admin:admin everywhere with domain admin creds for everyone and an NPS that nobody knew how to configure so they beat it with a wrench until things started working a decade ago. Ah, the good old days.
- teyc 2y agoWhat I was surprised to find in some big orgs is the processes have not evolved to be cloud first. There is lack of maturity, still a chain of committees, approvals, and manual processes; risk management still treats the services as a giant intranet, deployments are not scripted, ad hoc designs. Resources are placed in vnets so that they resemble a system they already know, and comes with all the associated risks.
- ElevenLathe 2y agoThis is the reality IME. I'm currently in an org that has been "in the cloud" for over ten years but is only now architecting (some) new projects in a cloud-first way. Meanwhile there is big pressure to get out of our rented cages so there is even more lift-and-shift migration happening. My guess is that we eat roughly 5x as much compute as we would need with proper scaling, and paying cloud prices for almost all of it.
- eleveriven 2y agoYep transition to cloud-first is still such a challenge for many big organizations
- Agingcoder 2y agoAny large scale transition actually !
- teyc 2y agoThe transition has to be accompanied by a revamp of all the technical processes associated with IT provisioning, which is too much and too risky to do.
- eleveriven 2y agoChange can be tough
- gtirloni 2y agoThey will want cloud-like APIs on-premises and most will implement OpenStack. The second wave of migrations to the cloud will be even quicker for these companies making their way back to on premises.
- badgersnake 2y agoIt’s the same old MBA cycle we had with onshoring / offshoring. Everyone wants to build their resume so they have to change things. In this cycle a new MBA comes in wants to make an impact so does a cloud transition. Then they move on and the next guy comes in, wants to make an impact so moves things back in house. Repeat until some new fad comes along.
- WaitWaitWha 2y agoThis is partially the result of cloud providers and partially business leadership. They, for whatever reason, insufficiently educated their clients on migration requirements. Lift & shift from on-premises to cloud only work for emergency. The shifted resources must be converted to cloud stack, or the cost will be multiples of on-prem costs. Business leadership was (is?) ignoring IT teams screaming of the problem with lift & shift. Now, businesses shifting back to on-prem because they are still uneducated on how to make cloud useful. They will just shift all non-core activities to XaaS vendors, reducing their own cloud managed solutions. Source: dealing with multiple non-software, tech firms that are doing just that, shifting own things back to on-prem, non-core resources to XaaS.
- Agingcoder 2y agoI keep reading ´ Lift and shift is bad ‘ on HN - what is the opposite of lift and shift ? ( ´cloud native ´ does not mean much to me). Is it that instead of oracle running on a rented vm you use whatever db your cloud provider is selling you, you move your monolith to a service oriented architecture running in k8s, etc ?
- tg180 2y agoIn simple terms, yes. The term “native” refers to adopting the vendor’s technology stack, which typically includes managed data stores, containerized microservices, serverless functions, and immutable infrastructure.
- Agingcoder 2y agoThanks. I work for a very large org, and cloud benefits are not obvious to me ( ie we’re large enough to absorb the cost of a team managing k8s for everyone, another team managing our own data centers around the world etc ). I view cloud as mutualizing costs and expertise with other people ( engineers and infra), but adding a very hefty margin on top of it, along with vendor lockin. If you’re big enough to mutualize internally, or don’t need some of the specific ultra scale cloud products, it’s not an obvious fit to me ( in particular , you don’t want to pay the margin ) I understand that for a significant chunk of people it’s useful provided that they use as many mutualizing levers as possible which is what going native is about. Is my understanding correct ?
- jakupovic 2y agoSerious businesses are not doing this.
- bsaul 2y agoRecently, i've come to realize one real use of those clouds was to provide a good US-EU network connection. If you want to provide both continent users with correct bandwidth to your service, you have no choice but to have them connect to a datacenter on their own continent. Public data transit across the atlantic is simply miserable. Then, because they probably have private atlantic cables, you can replicate at good reliable speed.
- efitz 2y agoThere are certain workloads that have never been really economical to run in cloud. Cloud economics is based on multi-tenancy, eg if you have a lot of hardware that is sitting idle a lot of the time, then cloud may be economical for you as the cloud provider can share it between you and others. Cloud is also good for episodic use of expensive exotic systems like HPC and GPU fleets, if you don’t need them all the time- I call this serial multi-tenancy. Cloud is not economical for massive storage, especially if you’re not willing to use backup solutions and reduced availability. For example, AWS S3 default keeps multiple copies of uploaded data; this is not comparable to typical on-premises RAID 1 or RAID 3. You can save money with reduced redundancy storage but then you have to take on more of the reliability burden. Likewise compute is cheap if you’re buying multi-tenant instances, but if you want dedicated instances or bare metal, then the economics aren’t nearly as attractive. Cloud is also good for experimentation and rapid development - it’s so much faster to click a few buttons than to go through the hardware acquisition processes at many enterprises. The companies that regret cloud due to financial concerns usually make two mistakes. First, as noted above, they pay for premium services that are not directly comparable to on-prem, or they use workloads in cloud that are not cloud economical, or both. Second, they don’t constrain random usage enough. It is super easy for a developer doing some testing to spin up thousands of dollars of bill. And it’s even worse if they leave it at the end of the day and go home- it’s still racking up hourly usage. And it’s downright ugly if they forget it and move on to something else. You have to be super disciplined to not spin up more than you need and turn it off as soon as you’re done with it.
- cyberax 2y ago> but if you want dedicated instances or bare metal Multitenant instances on AWS statically partition the hardware (CPU, RAM, network), so tenants don't really share all that much. Memory bandwidth is probably the only really affected resource. > Second, they don’t constrain random usage enough. AWS now has billing alerts with per-hour resolution and automatic anomaly detection. There are third-party tools that do the same.
- efitz 2y ago> Multitenant instances on AWS statically partition the hardware (CPU, RAM, network), so tenants don't really share all that much. You are missing several points: First, density. Cloud providers have huge machines that can run lots of VMs, and AWS in particular uses hardware (”Nitro”) for hypervisor functionality so they have very low overhead. Cloud providers also don’t do “hardware” partitioning for many instance types. AWS sells “VCPUs” as the capacity unit; this is not necessarily a core, it may be time on a core. Cloud providers can also over-provision; like airlines can sell more seats than exist on a plane, cloud providers can sell more VCPUs than cores on a machine, assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of instances will be idle most of the time, and they can manage noisy neighbors via live migration. And lots of other more esoteric stuff.
- denkmoon 2y agoIt doesn't seem to say in the article and it's not really discussed in these "LEAVING THE CLOUDS!!" articles, but what are these orgs doing for on-prem? Given the broadcom acquisition of vmware, rebuilding massive vsphere clusters like it's 2010 doesn't seem like a good long term play. Are they moving to kubernetes? Some other hypervisor?
- lemme_tell_ya 2y agoPossibly some amount of Triton and Oxide
- weikju 2y agoAt least in the case of 37signals, they went with colocated servers, some type of KVM and their own tool, Kamal, for containerized deployments without the complexity of kubernetes. You can find one post here with many links at the bottom https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit
- justinko 2y agoI think non-cloud is the new monolith, which is fantastic.
- langsoul-com 2y agoAll large orgs start running their own cloud infra at some point. So this has been a case for very long. Cloud is great until you have Sooooo much money and the running costs is too damn high.
- indulona 2y agocloud was supposed to be the cheap one stop shop where sheer numbers make overall prices low. but instead, they priced themselves out of existence. slowly, but surely. when you can run any offered services on your own for cheaper, then you know their entire business model is based on entrapment and and vendor lock-in, making leaving them engineering impossibility.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoGEICO is moving away from the cloud because their IT is a joke. They had a horrible on-prem infrastructure, so they moved to the cloud not knowing how, and they made the same mistakes in the cloud as on-prem, plus the usual mistakes every cloud migration runs into. They are moving away from the cloud because their new VP's entire career is focused on running her own hardware. What we know about their new setup is absolutely bonkers (like, K8s-on-OpenStack-on-K8s bonkers). Look to them for what not to do. 37signals is like the poster child for NIH syndrome. They keep touting cost savings as the reason for the move, but from what I have gathered, they basically did nothing to save cost in the cloud. It is trivial to save 75% off AWS's list price. They will even walk you through it, they literally want you to save money. That, plus using specific tech in specific ways, allows you to reap major benefits of modern designs while reducing cost more. 37signals didn't seem to want to go that route. But they do love to build their own things, so servers would be a natural thing for them to DIY. Almost every argument against the cloud - cost inefficiency, fear of vendor lock-in, etc - has easy solutions that make the whole thing extremely cost competitive, if not a way better value, than trying to become your own cloud hosting provider. It's very hard to estimate the real world costs, both known and unknown, of DIY hosting (specifically the expertise, or lack of it, and the impacts from doing it wrong, which is very likely to happen if cloud hosting isn't your core business). But it's a 100% guarantee that you will never do it better than AWS. AI is the only place I could reasonably imagine somebody having an on-prem advantage. At the moment, we still live in a world where that hardware isn't a commodity in the way every other server is. So you might just be faster to deploy, or cheaper to buy, with AI gear. Storage is similar but not nearly as tight a market. But that will change eventually once either the hype bubble bursts, or there's more gear for cheaper for the cloud providers to sell.
- cdchn 2y ago>K8s-on-OpenStack-on-K8s bonkers Do what now???
- p_l 2y agoIt's actually quite reasonable if for bad reasons. TL;DR setting up OpenStack was so horrible I think SAP started deploying it through k8s. So if you want to setup local "private cloud" kind of setup it makes sense to set up OpenStack on k8s. If you then want to provide multiple clusters cloud-style to the rest of the organization... well, it's just layered again. In fact, at least one significantly-sized european vendor in on-prem k8s space did exactly that kind of sandwich, to my knowledge.
- fancythat 2y agoI will use an opportunity to confirm that cloud is ill-suited for almost all but niche business cases and majority of users were dragged into cloud platforms either by free credits or (my suspicion) some grey kick-back schemes with C-level guys. At my current project (Fortune 500 saas company, was there for both on-prem to cloud and then cloud-to-cloud migration): a) Resources are terribly expensive. Usual tricks you find online (spot instances) usually cannot be applied for some specific work related reason. In our estimates, in contrast to even the hw/sw list-prices, cloud is 5x-10x more expensive, of course depending on the features you are planning to use. b) There is always a sort of "direction" cloud provider pushes you into: in my case, costs between VMs and Kubernetes are so high, we get almost weekly demands to make the conversion, even though Kubernetes for some of the scenarios we have don't make any sense. c) Even though we are spending 6 figures, now maybe even 7 figures on the infrastructure monthly, priority support answer that we receive are borderline comical and in-line with one response we received when we asked why our DB service was down, quote: "DB has experienced some issues so it was restarted." d) When we were having on-prem, some new features asked from ops side, were usually implemented / investigated in a day or so. Nowadays, in most cases, answers are available after week or so of investigation, because each thing has its own name and lingo with different cloud providers. This can be solved with specific cloud certifications, but in real-world, we cannot pause the business for 6 months until all ops are completely knowledgeable about all inner workings of the currently popular cloud provider. e) Performance is atrocious at times. That multi-tenancy some guys are mentioning here is for provider's benefit not for the customer. They cram ungodly amount of workload on machines, that mostly works, until it doesn't and when it does not, effects are catastrophic. Yes, you can have isolation and dedicated resources, but a) f) Security and reliability features are overly exaggerated. From the observable facts, in the last year, we had 4 major incidents lasting several hours strictly related to the platform (total connectivity failure, total service failure, complete loss of one of the sites, etc). In the end, for anyone who wants to get deeper into this, check what Ahrefs wrote about cloud.
- andrewstuart 2y ago9 cents per gigabyte egress is the core of why companies are leaving the cloud. That’s the start point that gets them thinking about all the other ways it’s a bad idea. “The cloud is where Moore’s law goes to die.”
- Mortiffer 2y agoHow can we get ride of vendor lock-in and have fait market competition get prices down for cloud? It must be possible to make cloud more cost effective via specialization versus every company building the same infrastructure again and again.
- scirob 2y agoProposed solution: A set of neutral validators that define standard Interfaces and then test any cloud wanting to get listed for compatibility and minimum included performance (also egress). If all this data is open we should get competition back and fix cloud. Disclaimer: I am working on suh a system, enterprise love the idea it does well at hackathons but not production ready on the validation standard yet. Would be happy to get critical HN feedback.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoThere is a ton of companies in the cloud, that do not know- how to do cloud infra. So they park there administration- at their integrating customers. Which then ditch the avalanche of burning and rebuild huts. A meta-standard for deployment and infrastructure setup is needed and should be forced down the throats of the resisting patient.
- bob1029 2y agoI think control is maybe a bigger factor than cost these days. Being able to hold anyone accountable at all seems to be an operational superpower. Working with cloud vendor support is a torturous experience on a good day. It also doesn't matter how expensive the virtual machine is if there isn't one available to be provisioned. I know it's kind of harsh, but owning the whole vertical and having the power to instantly fire anyone for giving an Azure-tier response is why these companies are doing it in my mind. Waiting on a 3rd party to find their own ass with a whole S&R team every time you need help is quite exhausting. I've never worked with an IT vendor and thought "damn these people are so responsive I can't dream of doing it better myself".
- michaelt 2y agoIn some regards, absolutely. But remember even when you're doing everything on-prem with your own employees, you're still running software written by third parties. So you might still have an unresponsive third party, just they might be a database vendor instead of a cloud vendor.
- EraYaN 2y agoDepending on you size, even just having some people from all the open source products on staff is probably cheaper anyway. And gives you pretty good control. And if it used to work the only one that can have broken the config is you, which means you can also fix it. Sure maybe you need to rollback a kernel update or whatever but in the end it's on you.
- maccard 2y agoI work for a small orgthat is owned by a very large corp. Our spending is managed by large corp. If I want to buy a $10 domain, the process takes a month and requires escalating to a purchasing director. If I want to rent a new server from hetzner, same thing. If I want to spin up a bedrock instance for $1000/day on AWS - it’s already a line item in the budget so as long as I have a cost tag on the resource it’s pre-approved. As long as something is on the software catalog on AWS it’s ok to use.
- siva7 2y agoWell, major companies aren't ditching the cloud and there is no evidence for a trend otherwise. And 37signals isn't a major organization for any of the big cloud providers. They are just a rounding error.
- vidarh 2y agoMajor companies aren't paying the headline rates. Even at 37 signals size you're paying negotiated rates. And 37 signals may not be a "major" organization to you, but they're bigger than the vast majority of companies.
- siva7 2y agoThey are certainly a household name in the startup community but they are not a major organization for the big three cloud providers. Why is this important? Because the headline claims falsely that major companies are ditching the cloud providers. I have insights into the decision process for a major organization moving to the cloud and the motivation why 37 would leave cloud are in no way comparable to that of a major org.
- vidarh 2y ago"major" is subjective. They are larger than the vast majority of companies. That makes them "major" to me at least.
- politelemon 2y ago> For instance, companies can utilize cloud native NVMe-based storage solutions for their database or implement custom database hosting on cloud compute instances using Kubernetes, all while maintaining the cloud’s scalability and flexibility, avoiding any lock-in. I will always dispute this. K8s is also a lock-in, it does not magically free you from issues, it only brings in a separate set of issues, overheads and problems.
- xoneill 2y agoTelco, and I'm sure other industries, are adopting hybrid. Many things core to the business are being yanked out of the cloud.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago>Cloud repatriation is undoubtedly not for start-ups or scale-ups still on their way to profitability or product-market fit. For such companies, the cloud abstracts all the complexity of IT infrastructure and lets their teams focus on the business challenges. Hmm, what about companies that are expected to be stronger-than-average in computer science & software engineering, and might not yet have as much competitive advantage in business momentum or financial resources to begin with? Would it be better to leverage the strongest area of expertise or not? Tough decision, which I would be very conservative about making. Decade 0 of The Cloud didn't obscure very much of the heavens and it remained sunny with only a slight chance of scattered data. Now on first pass (decade 01) it looks like the cloud is ideal if you have huge amounts of data that needs to be shared with just about anybody anywhere at any time 24/7. I know I'm not in that league, so I can't speak from a position of expertise, but after this much dust has settled it does look like it would be most widely useful mainly for data which is not the least bit confidential. Especially data which is completely public, or intended to be public more so than was possible any other way. And then only as long as the ongoing cost is "virtually" insignificant compared to the fully amortized on-premises in-house alternative. Seems like it would really make sense to do this kind of financial analysis before deciding how to best handle the data that you want the world to have access to. Probably a good idea to consider how to best handle the other kind of data that you don't ever want to share with the world at all, which is a whole different equation. Any cloud in the way and it may be more challenging to break through the ceiling for the sky to be the limit on that one. At least this seems to be the kind of thing that has been consistent since the overcast started rolling in. But what do I know? I'm just an earth-bound observer ;)
- throw_m239339 2y agoIt comes down to cost, especially cost predictability. And now businesses have more "expertise" to manage their servers after all these years. Obvously, not everything is migrated out of the cloud. Cloud used to be cheap... it clearly isn't anymore.
- matt_johnston 2y ago> "While the cloud repatriation debate often focuses on the binary choice between cloud and on-premises, there’s a third path emerging: staying in the cloud while embracing alternative technologies and architectures." I think the potential of using "less managed" with K8s etc. rather than fully self-managed is relatively untapped.